I recently entered into a vocal argument with someone (let’s say X) about education in the humanities. It started out innocently enough when I commented that most of the job postings in my field this year have high teaching loads of 3:3 or higher. My personal opinion is that this reflected the scarcity of jobs at the larger state research universities this year due to budget problems. To my surprise, X responded that teaching loads should rise, or else faculty salary should come down, since for many years the cost of college education have risen rapidly, while humanities faculty simply do not bring in money to the university. The increase in teaching load, X felt, is simply a rational response to the current economic downturn. After all, professionals from many other fields have had to deal with salary freezes or benefit cuts. Why not professors?
Image from Wikimedia Commons.
The question of cost and profit and the place of the humanities in higher education has been much in the news recently, including an opinion piece in The Chronicles of Higher Education. X’s stance is probably in line with mainstream views of an ‘effete’ ivory tower. At a time when many students from low and even middle-income families are increasingly being priced out of college education, there is undeniably a sense of crisis in higher education. Yet, I must admit that I took X’s opinion as a personal attack. I became angry. Does X want college classes to be taught only by adjunct instructors, I demanded to know. Surely at $3000-$4000 per course, the price tag of adjuncts would satisfy even the most budget conscious critic. Or, perhaps we should simply scale pay to the number of students per class, with the most popular (and therefore, profitable) professors receiving a premium. Or perhaps we should simply give the humanities a quick and dignified death. What happened to the ideals of education?
My outburst very likely had less to do with X than the continuing stress of navigating a difficult job market. Several days after the argument, after I had calmed down, I thought about how neither of us really addressed the crux of the argument from our different vantage points. What is the goal of higher education? Americans have a plethora of options when it comes to choosing a college, from state flagship schools to the small private liberal arts college. But seen in another way, this broad range of options also indicates an inability to make up our minds on whether education should be a public good and therefore offered at state subsidized institutions or simply as any other consumer product offered in a competitive market. And if education is a business, open to questions of profitability and the bottom line, then X is right, the entire tenure-track system contains enormous inefficiencies. It is no longer rational. For those of us at the other end, however, going through years of schooling, writing, and teaching to reach that tenure-track professorship, the only beacon at the end of the road is that education should mean more than just the simple accounting of tuition, opportunity costs, and the bottom line.
March 24, 2010 at 3:09 pm |
Great post that summarizes many people’s frustrations, including my own. Overall the humanities seem to be undervalued. Because we don’t offer patents or direct profits, our work is more easily dismissed. And this lead’s to opinions like X’s among people who see us not as contributing to society, but as draining scarce resources from publicly funded institutions, or away from more ‘worthy’ pursuits.
What is most remarkable (and I don’t really have an immediate answer to this) is why this sea-change in opinion happened. At one time the humanities, the classic liberal education, was the pinnacle of higher learning, and now those of us who pursue it might be derided as self-indulgent or out of touch. How did we get from there to here?
March 24, 2010 at 5:05 pm |
Oh, I’ve been having this argument with colleagues recently, too. I hate that the current budget crisis is exacerbating departmental and disciplinary boundaries. The finger-pointing is not going to solve systemic problems. Neither will managing the university like a corporation.
March 24, 2010 at 6:57 pm |
Sadly I think many undergraduates are victims of escalating costs as well. I totally understand why people feel a great deal of resentment when they come out of an undergraduate education tens of thousands of dollars in debt. The ugly truth is that even in normal economic times, much less during a downturn, it takes a number of years to pay off the debt. The financial burden also very seriously limits one’s career options. I really do think that education is heading towards a point of crisis, much like the health care question, and that it will require a systemic overhaul and some soul searching about what we really want out of higher education.
April 6, 2010 at 7:03 am |
[...] careful not to lose sight of the intrinsic value of the study of history. Shellen Xiao Wu’s post, “The Dollars and Cents of Higher Education” highlights the lack of consensus in the United States over whether higher education is a public good [...]